🍰✨

“Looking back, the only way this stuff worked was to have made them in these very real corporate settings that, to this day, I don’t feel like I ever belonged in. But it is this feeling of unbelonging that I wanted to explore in the work you’re about to see.”

“They sort of looked at the absurdity of working within a huge company that raked in billions of dollars a year and saw themselves working within it as a small art form that requires a series of small rebellions.”

“What I consider my most successful work does not line up with how the institution views success.”

“This piece was a meta-commentary on the media’s fixation on the royals, which, in my head, can be likened to self-harm. I wanted to create a scenario that was like, each click gives you a little reward, a little dopamine hit, like you’re a fucking hamster, and you just want a little bit more. And the squirrel is a hateful squirrel, and he’s watching you as you perform self-harm over and over.”

All from this incredibly quotable talk from Tracy Ma.